INPS adopts Linked Data

After the great success of budget.g0v.it, the site that visualises the Italian Budget Law, another major institution has adopted the solution developed by the Copernicani’s g0v.it team.

It is INPS, which through its President Tito Boeri and its general director Dr Antonello Crudo decided to support the cause of transparency by putting all of its budgets online.

And once again the tools produced by LinkedData.Center are what delivered the excellent result.

Figure: the INPS open-data application — open inps.g0v.it to use it.

In particular, our Smart Data Management Platform (community edition) and LODMAP2D’s graphical-visualisation toolkits were used.

Yassine Ouahidi, Mohd Ehtesham Miah and Leonardo Longhi — the three students whom LinkedData.Center wanted as partners in its own adventure the previous year — were invited to Rome on 14 December to take part in the celebrations for the institute’s 120th anniversary and to attend the presentation of the system they actively helped to build. In the photograph they are portrayed together with President Tito Boeri and Dr Andrea Danielli, president of the Copernicani association.

Figure: the three students with President Tito Boeri and Andrea Danielli.

As with budget.g0v.it, LinkedData.Center decided to publish all of the code as open source, donating it to the community of Italian civic hackers in the hope that more and more bodies will follow the example of the Ministry of Finance and of INPS.

What was done

The g0v.it team started from the Open Data published by the website of the Istituto Nazionale Previdenza Sociale.

These data were “fed” to LinkedData.Center’s SDaaS platform, which gave them meaning, built a knowledge base and resolved inconsistencies. They were then analysed and analytical indicators were created. The platform was able to turn all of INPS’s budgets from 2014 onwards into Linked Data in less than 35 seconds.

The knowledge acquired was then “exposed” as a web service with tools for visualising and exploring the data, using some of the Lodmap2D libraries.

Why Linked Data

The power of Linked Data makes it possible to:

• give data a meaning and link data together;
• add databases progressively and at any time;
• handle data errors and inconsistencies simply;
• apply analytical algorithms, such as machine learning, to extract value from the data.

LinkedData.Center is an innovative startup offering a global service to create knowledge bases using Linked Data simply, as a service — as a service.

Companies of any size can literally “pull their data out of the drawers” and turn it into knowledge to answer business questions.

How it works in practice

This is what LinkedData.Center does:

• you choose the data you want to use, including Open or external or web data;
• you connect the databases and give them a meaning;
• you decide the questions or analyses you want to run.

LinkedData.Center takes on all of the complexity, while the user is left with the task of indicating the data, explaining the meaning of their data and deciding the questions.

The whole thing is managed “as a service”. The service can be tried online in a few minutes through an intuitive tutorial, for which no software download onto your machine is required.